You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train by Zinn Howard

Author:Zinn, Howard [Zinn, Howard]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Beacon Press
Published: 2010-10-06T04:00:00+00:00

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The Last

Teach-In

The remarkable growth of the antiwar movement can be measured by the size of the rallies on the Boston Common as they grew from year to year after that first poorly attended one in the spring of 1965. Two years later, a rally on the Common brought thousands of people. It was observed by the FBI and is described in an entry in my FBI file.

I got that file under the Freedom of Information Act—several hundred pages, mostly boring, with many blacked-out sections, but reminding me of many forgotten rallies and speeches. The FBI is supposed to investigate criminal activities, but, like the old Soviet secret police, it seems also to take note of gatherings and public statements where the government is criticized.

The FBI file reported: “On October 16, 1967, a public anti-draft protest demonstration took place on the Boston Common … with an estimated 4000–5000 individuals, males and females, in attendance. This protest demonstration … was observed by Special Agents of the F.B.I. Among the speakers appearing at this demonstration was Professor Howard Zinn.… The morning edition of the Boston Globe … carried an article captioned ’67 Burn Draft Cards in Boston—214 Turn in Cards, 5000 at Rally.’ ”

The FBI report also reproduced some of my speech as reported in the Globe: “The 13,000 Americans who died in Vietnam died because they were sent there under the orders of politicians and generals who sacrificed them on behalf of their own ambitions.… We owe it to our conscience, to the people of this country, to the principles of American democracy, to declare our independence of this war, to resist it in every way we can, until it comes to an end, until there is peace in Vietnam.”

The people assembled on the Common that morning then marched to the historic Arlington Street Church, where they crowded into the ancient pews to listen to William Sloane Coffin, the Yale chaplain, and Michael Ferber, a Harvard graduate student (both would be indicted, with Dr. Benjamin Spock and writers Mitchell Goodman and Marcus Raskin, for conspiring against the draft law). Coffin, whom I had met years before in New Haven, was one of the antiwar movement’s most eloquent speakers. Ferber was new to it, but made an extraordinary, passionate, personal statement.

Then the historic church candlestick, placed there over a century before by the antislavery preacher William Ellery Channing, was held up as young men approached it and held their draft cards to the flame.

The scene was being enacted all over the country, with draft cards either burned or collected to be turned in to the Justice Department in Washington. And the following day a huge antiwar rally at the Lincoln Memorial culminated at night with an eerie confrontation at the Pentagon, thousands of protesters facing thousands of National Guardsmen and Army regulars. At one point a former Green Beret, now a protester, speaking through a bullhorn to the soldiers, told why he had turned against the war.

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